Monthly Archives: November 2013

We are pleased to announce that we have appointed a new Admin & Fund-raising Assistant. Tam Gilbert joined LinkUpArts in October.

Tam will be working with the committee to support with the day-to-day issues, marketing and fund-raising.

Tam has over 10 years of hard earned experience in disability and community theatre. Since graduating with a second class honours English Degree from the University of Kent at Canterbury, she has thrown herself into the world of educational and community theatre and is an accomplished performer, facilitator and writer.

Tam spent 9 years with Bournemouth’s Double Act Disability Theatre Company, where she performed in 10 shows, learned the art of facilitating workshops and managed and organised tours and other projects.

Alongside her work with Double Act, Tam trained for four years as Assistant Director on the Remix Youth Performance Company (managed by Activate Performing Arts), where she worked alongside the Artistic Director, assisting on residencies and taking on admin as required.

Tam recently worked with both companies as an Emerging Artist on ‘Breathe’ – an exciting collaboration of professional and non-professional integrated artists and performers working with Dorset’s Diverse City Theatre Company. The show was the result of an Arts Council commission and was performed on Weymouth beach as part of the opening of the sailing events for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

In addition to working with LinkUpArts, Tam is currently further developing herself as a disabled artist and has recently established Bournemouth-based Persuasion Arts, under which she runs drama workshops and projects for disabled people and other members of the community.

Tam says “I’m really excited to be working with LUA and look forward to finding out more about the art, the artists and others involved!”

Sue Austin, Liz Crow and Gini are brought together in ‘People Like You’ not just because they are three female artists who move on wheels, but because each in her own way seeks to challenge society’s attitudes to disability through her arts practice. The exhibition was shown in 2013 at Salisbury Arts Centre and Lighthouse, Poole’s Centre for the Arts and was supported by Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts.

Bedding Out was a 48 hour durational performance as part of People Like You.

“Originating with a performance as part of SPILL Festival of Performance in November 2012, Bedding Out emerges from the current welfare benefits overhaul, which threatens many with poverty and a propagandist campaign that has seen a doubling in disability hate crime.

The project sees artist-activist Liz Crow taking her private bed-oriented life and placing it in the public arena for all to see over a 48-hour period in order to show that what many see as contradiction, or fraud, is simply the complexity of real life. Bedding Out has gone on to tour as part of the People Like You exhibition at Salisbury Arts Centre in April 2013, coinciding with the introduction of the Personal Independence Payment, which replaced Disability Living Allowance on 8 April 2013.

Members of the public are invited to participate in ‘Bedside Conversations’, gathering around the bed to talk about the work, its backdrop and its politics, while those unable to attend in person are invited to take part virtually, through social media. The Salisbury performance was watched on livestream by more than 9,750 people in over 50 countries and received national coverage in The Guardian newspaper. In August 2013, Bedding Out travelled to Edinburgh where it was performed as part of The Fringe.

People Like you is an exhibition by LinkUpArts in partnership with Salisbury Arts Centre and Disability Arts Online with artists Sue Austin, Liz Crow and Gini and has been supported through Arts Council’s Grants for Arts.

The exhibition starts at the box office. Immediately opposite the box office you will find Gini’s Scrolls. A set of scrolls which can be taken out of their tubes and examined. These form the main part of Creatives In Con.Text, Gini’s DAO Diverse Perspectives commission. Each scroll is a visual and textual exploration of context conversations in which Gini has interacted with artists and their audiences about creating and responding to the arts. The scrolls are: Creatives in Context, Cont.Text within Flint, and Endelig. There is a bonus fourth scroll labelled Context which contains poems blogged on disability arts online in the lead up to the exhibition.

In the alcove before the exhibition starts, white felt alphabet letters are dotted around the floor. They were made in a collaborative project between Gini and Salisbury Arts Centre Craft Club. The work is called Secret Sentence You are invited to Recreate the original sentence, which you can find in the artwork, or make up your own in your favourite Arts Centre spot and take a photograph. We will include it in the exhibition. Here you will also find the LinkUpArts PLY Project, a photography project which exhibits past and present photographs of people like you. You are invited to submit your own photos. Details are on the information sheet provided and box office staff are available to assist.

Sue Austin ‘Creating the Spectacle!’

Shot in the Red Sea, ‘Creating the Spectacle!’ is part of a series of a ground-breaking live art, moving image and online works by artist Sue Austin, featuring an underwater wheelchair that leaves traces of its joy and freedom as it flies along through the water with its human occupant.

The work is designed to transform preconceptions by using the unexpected juxtapositions of scuba equipment and an NHS wheelchair to excite, inspire and open up new ways of seeing, being and knowing.

Conceived by Artistic Director Sue Austin and produced through Freewheeling, ‘Creating the Spectacle!’ aims to generate a widespread public debate about the nature and value of contemporary arts practice shaped by the experience of disability. ‘Creating the Spectacle!’ was an Unlimited commission for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

‘Creating the Spectacle!’ Online: Part 1 Finding Freedom

Submerged in a turquoise tropical waterscape we dive straight into the action, a strange contraption – the back of a sub-aquatic wheelchair lifts off, whooshing up from the white sandy seabed leaving trails of tiny silver bubbles.

Its occupant waves her arms out to her sides in dancelike gestures, her long dark brown hair splayed up and out behind her.

Breathing from a black air cylinder attached to the back of the chair she takes a journey through the underwater environment leaving a trail of bubbles.

Three screens show a turquoise blue mist. Teased with abstracts of bubbles and hair and chair the soundtrack urges the viewer to look on, waiting for a longer glimpse of what this might be. Then suddenly and unexpected, but serene and beautiful a woman comes into view. Wearing a green and white floral dress and seated in a wheelchair she glides through the water. Bubbles start rising up in the background emulating her joy and freedom as she dances.

‘Creating the Spectacle!’ 360 degree Part 2 In the Antheas at Ras Katy by Sue Austin

Three screens create a digital panoramic tropical aquarium. Hundreds of orange fish flicker in the light of the beautiful, tranquil red sea in Egypt. The view is filled by the deep blue sea with huge pastel coloured coral heads colonised by the sea life.

An aquanaut in her wheelchair explores the underwater environment. On closer inspection the standard red NHS Wheelchair has been adapted with propellers under the seat, large fin-shaped clear acrylic footplates and scuba diving breathing equipment. The woman is artist Sue Austin, whose long dark brown hair flows behind her as she loops, dives and dances through the water in the new found freedom of the underwater wheelchair.

‘Creating the Spectacle!’ 360 degree Part 3 Flowing Fire

The final film in the looped panoramas was created as part of a commission from LOCOG for 2012. It has a narrative in which we find that the underwater aquanaut has discovered the 2012 Paralympic torch in the sea. She liberates it, as it smolders and burns leaving a trail of bubbles coming from the top. She dances with a ball of tiny glass fish as they flicker this way and that with flashes of light.

‘Creating the Spectacle!’ Online Part 2 Free Floating

The second single screen film is a brightly lit and euphoric piece in which the underwater wheelchair, with its human occupant becomes acrobatic, swirling around in a dance amidst a wall of bubbles. It’s the most animated and lively of the films and shows the true joy and freedom that being and performing in the chair brings.

With thanks to the Freewheeling team, Camel Dive team and all sponsors and supporters. Full list available online

From 10 – 14 April, there will be a 360 degree immersive installation in Salisbury Arts Centre’s main space. Staff and volunteers will be available for live audio description. Please ask at the box office for details.

Adjacent to ‘Creating the Spectacle!’ is Underwater Con.Text a special piece by Gini in response to Sue Austin’s work. Trained members of staff and volunteers are available to read this aloud and it is available online at www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/Gini-Underwater-ConText

Turn 180 degrees to find the second section of People Like You. A collection of wall based monochrome fine detailed drawings by Gini which take inspiration from Creatives in Con.Text. Each picture reflects words spoken in the conversations.

In front of the drawings and towards the arts centre café you will find white life size soft sculptures. Gini invites you to explore them with your hands. They are: Kouros and Koure (by the steps leading to the café), echoing the classical Greek Kouroi, and are a reminder of how young and unformed our civilisation still is, and how far we have yet to travel to possibly deserve that description.

Jessie, Fons and Kosta (in the main gallery space) are both younger and older, representing the past and the future. Part human, part something other, root like they extend into the space. Without time and universal, but also unique and personal, they ask questions of a future where diversity appears increasingly problematic. The physical and emotional geography we construct to frame our coexistence in ever decreasing spaces demands ever increasing conformity – a simplification apparently necessary as counterpoint to the complexities of financial structures, political powers and ideologies that threaten to overwhelm us.

They make visible questions of the longings that thread through Gini’s arts practice from its beginning and of the questions that come alive in Con.Text conversations.

Linking the wall based work and the soft sculptures is a relief work with more of the root structures growing out from the frame. This represents a reflection of what the figures might see in the mirror, jewelled and sparkling, they are the pretty face you put on when you look in the mirror.

In the corner of the exhibition space you will find a dark blue arm chair. Gini and Mirka Golden Hann, Salisbury Arts Centre’s resident potter have created Dark Blue World a Ceramic Braille bowl with music and translation

Settle yourself in James’s armchair and take Mirka’s pot in your hands to read the Braille. In the headphones you can hear the original music, and on the paper is Gini’s interpretation of the original song.

Nothing Changes is another collaborative Ceramic piece which is described as a Con.Text tile puzzle. The words are jumbled, explore the tiles and recreate the words from the Con.text scrolls.

the wall on the slope to the Arts Centre Café is different. Usually there is a black, drab long straight grab rail. Gini’s signature piece commissioned specially for this exhibition is the installation of shocking pink grab rails spelling out the words ‘people like you’. Well integrated into any created geography that involves changes of level, the ubiquitous grab rail, so familiar to many of us, is probably invisible to most of the population. It may be taken advantage of totally unconsciously and even unnecessarily.

In the café on the altar stage is Bedding Out Created and performed by Liz Crow

A five-week installation and 48-hour round-the-clock live durational performance by artist-activist Liz Crow taking place at Salisbury Arts Centre and the twittersphere.

Bedding Out takes place in two parts.

Part 1 Installation – 8 March to 7 April

On the stage above the café area, a life-sized photograph printed onto vinyl matting – a bird’s-eye-view image of a bed, downy quilt and white pillows, a splash of berry-red fabric draped across the foot – lies flat on the black floor of the stage. Chairs are grouped around the bed.

Mounted on the wall above the bedhead, a large monitor screens an eight-minute audio-visual slideshow drawn from a performance in which artist-activist Liz Crow took to her bed in a gallery for three days.

Accompanying the audio is a series of timelapse photographic stills of the performance, changing every two seconds to show the passing of time throughout a day.

The artist lies in a white walled room, high windows, warm wood floor. The door is propped open and people gather intermittently to look beyond a red rope into the room at the figure in the bed. The bed is wooden framed, homely, the quilt a soft expanse of white. Sun patterns stream from the window in patches on the wall, moving across the walls as time passes.

Twice a flurry of people enter the room and sit around the bed in conversation, then leaving the woman, alone again.

Day’s end and the woman leaves the bed. The room is dismantled, emptied of chairs, bedding stripped, until all that is left is the empty bed, and the door closes to black.

Audiences can experience the work from the café via captions, or can go onto the stage where headphones are attached to the monitor. The slideshow loops, but can be reset by audience members to the beginning by pressing play on the DVD player.

Part 2: Performance – From 2pm on 10 April – 2pm on 12 April

Raised on the stage above the café area, a woman lies in her bed. Behind the bed, white drapes form a wall along the back of the stage. In a pool of soft warm light, the woman reclines.

In this performance space, for a period of 48 hours, artist-activist Liz Crow has taken to her bed.

Around the bed loops a red rope barrier. Audiences can mount the stage and gather to watch the woman exhibited.

Bedding Out emerges from the current welfare benefits overhaul, which threatens many with poverty and with a propagandist campaign that has seen disability hate crime leap by 50%.

Says Liz, “I wear a public self that is energetic, dynamic and happening. I am also ill and spend much of life in bed. The private self is neither beautiful nor grownup, it does not win friends or accolades, and I conceal it carefully. But the benefits system demands a reversal, my private self paraded to justify support.

“For me, along with thousands more, this new system of benefits demands a reversal: my public self implies I don’t need support and must be denied, whilst my private self must be paraded as justification for the state’s support. For some months, I have lain low for fear of being penalised, but the performer is beginning to re-emerge; instead of letting fear determine who I am, I’d rather stare it in the face.”

“Bedding Out is a performance in which I take my private self and make it public, something I have not done in over 30 years. It feels dangerous exposed exciting. On this stage, for a period of 48 hours, I am performing the other side of my fractured self, my bed-life. Since the public me is so carefully constructed, this will be a kind of un-performing of my self.

“I want to make a twilight existence visible. But more, I want to show that what many people see as contradiction, what they call fraud, is only the complexity of real life. This is not a work of tragedy, but of invisibility and visibility, and complication; a chance to perform my self without façade.”

You can participate directly in Bedding Out:

In Bedside Conversations members of the public gather round the bed to talk about the work, its backdrop and its politics.

You can take part Wed 10 2.30pm and 6.00pm; Thu 11 3.15pm; Fri 12 10.15am (sessions will last 40 minutes).

A Twitter-based Conversation will be held Thu 11 at noon.

There is Free Entry but Limited capacity so please Sign up at box office.

A BSL interpreter and a notetaker available at all BedsideConversations.

On twitter: Follow the work – and join in from the café and beyond – throughout the exhibition: @RGPLizCrow #beddingout Join a twitter-based Bedside Conversation on Thu 11 Apr at noon.